(We present DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Andorran band Persefone, which was released not long ago by Napalm Records.)
A guarantee with Andorra’s Persefone is that you are going to get a lot of music. Persefone have made a career out of albums hybridizing progressive metal, melodeath, and as wide a smattering of other genres as they could into a form of tightly controlled chaos with multiple vocal approaches serving as the icings on the cake.
They’re a full-album band and very rarely, throughout a surprisingly long career, have done any sort of single or EP as part of their discography. Persefone have always dealt in releasing densely packed albums, and as of 2022’s Metanoia were up to a grand total of six.
With all of those elements making up Persefone‘s career it is surprising that the band have seen relatively little change on the lineup front – especially since they really found their groove with 2013’s Spiritual Migration. Since then, other than a re-recording of their first album Truth Inside The Shades in 2020, the band have refined upon the eastern sprituality subject matter and massive keyboard-wall approach to their writing style.
Which is why it is both fitting and very interesting that the group’s newest release is just an EP but also has a ‘Part I’ tacked onto its name.
photo by Eric Rossell
Lingua Ignota: Part I is Persefone‘s latest release and arrives surprisingly soon for a band that has usually had three-to-high-four-year gaps between albums. Consisting of three very ‘large’ songs and an atmospheric introduction and moody outro piece, Lingua Ignota: Part I is the group’s first release with vocalist Daniel R Flys – also newly added to Eternal Storm since their last release, so that’s a gentleman with one hell of a release schedule coming up – in the lead position.
In a lot of ways, Lingua Ignota: Part I is Persefone making it clear that in spite of any changes, that core of the band remains the same, even down to the dynamics of the EP. They have had albums with extended instrumental sections, and for as much as we liked 2017’s Aathma around here, it did have a dynamic of multiple instrumental pieces basically stitching themselves onto a few singles and a gigantic EP right at the end. Metanoia actually did the same but did a little bit more of an even spread.
So, two years later, Lingua Ignota: Part I doing the whole thing in microcosm may just be about the most Persefone-thing Persefone could have done. What really hangs on though is that ‘Part I’ affixed to the title, because by the end of Lingua Ignota: Part I, you still get the idea that Persefone have a lot more to say.
If you had been told that Lingua Ignota had an introductory piece and a closing number to bookend the actual bulk of the music, and you knew that it was Persefone that we were talking about, seeing that the opening song is over two minutes and the closing one is close to four suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Even at their most minimalist the band can’t help themselves, and thus the album opens on the steady build up “Sounds And Vessels” – which is referenced a few times lyrically throughout this EP – and closes on the dark atmospherics and industrial thrum of “Abyssal Communication”. Those are the times when Persefone are at their most ‘bare’ on Lingua Ignota: Part I and they do so by building up to the classic everything-and-the-house-next-door’s-sink sound they’re known for and then slowly peeling it all away to close things out. As mentioned before, it’s their album experience made into shorthand form and it works very well for them here.
photo by Eric Rossell
The actual three-fer of music – “One Word”, “The Equable”, and “Lingua Ignota” – are all six to seven and a half minutes in length and are what you would expect from Persefone as a whole. They don’t stray too far from where they were situated in the enlightened halls of Metanoia, save for a few refinements on some of the more jarring transitions between parts – Lingua Ignota has fewer sudden stops and immedate neck-breaking changes – and a slightly heavier favoritism for a chugging rhythm riff.
Persefone have always straddled the line on synth-laden melodeath and prog-metal and that tightly-controlled ball of chaos has lent itself to the more ‘-core’ side of guitar writing as well. Persefone absorb a lot into their sound but they never morph into a completely different band; it has always felt as if it’s another layer added on to their sound. Thus, there is a little bit of typewriter-ey guitar at times but it is in service of walking a song from one segment to another. More often, Persefone are instead well within their known homestead of fast moving riff work and finger-workouts on the stringed instruments, building to a sing-along power chorus or another synth line that moves along the keys with the deftness of a trained dancer.
It alway seems as if your first experience with Persefone is going to be the one that wins you over and every release after that is variation or shade of that release. Persefone‘s career seems to partially exist in finding ways to refine upon or alter their sound across a very consistent collection of music. You could take the leap with the band at almost any point post Shin-Ken and find yourself within a world of music that is so easy to get lost in, so constantly spinning that there’s always something to discover, and as you move later in their career, so wrapped in its own explorations of philosophy and spirituality that it takes a long while to escape.
Lingua Ignota: Part I is no different, even at twenty-six minutes of music. Save for a new vocalist – who slots right into the old spot as if it never changed – Lingua Ignota is Persefone knocking out the Persefone blueprint as best they can. The bulk of the music in the center of the EP journeys across multiple musical spheres, and as a tightly compacted experience it works well for them. If/When Persefone decide to expand upon this with a Part II, or wherever else they pack their bags and journey to, it is going to remain intriguing and a follow-up that will be worth looking forward to.